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Featured Author: A.D. Ross – Realities Perceived

A.D. Ross

Featured Author: A.D. Ross

Featured Author: A.D. Ross first started writing seriously whilst studying at university, having become involved in numerous student film productions. After several years scripting and filming a great many, not particularly serious projects, he wrote and directed a short film entitled “Plan C”, which was entered into “Screentest”, the UK’s National Student Film Festival in 2010. In 2011 he was long-listed for the BBC’s Future Talent Award for his unproduced screenplay ‘Alive’. However, after completing his PhD in Modern British History and subsequently being forced to get an actual job and abandon the lifestyle of a student, Adam has increasingly dedicated his free time to writing prose. He has written a number of short stories and after accumulating a moderately large collection of rejections, he received his first professional acceptance in early 2017; that story is due to be published in late 2018. Adam is currently working on his first full length novel, whilst concurrently attempting to prevent his short stories from becoming his second, third and fourth novels respectively. When not writing fiction, he blogs on pop cultural matters at the Cultural Implosion (http://culturalimplosion.blogspot.co.uk), a blog spun out from Adam’s rambling student radio show and he threatens sporadically to revive that show as a podcast. Adam can also be found on Twitter @AdXRoss. Adam Ross was born, raised and educated in the North of England and has yet to reside anywhere else.

LHP: How long have you been writing?

A.D. Ross: I’ve been writing seriously since 2001, though I’ve been scribbling away longer than I can remember. I’ve been concentrating on prose since about 2012; prior to that I mostly wrote screenplays for short films.Back to top >>>

LHP: What genre do you prefer to write in?

A.D. Ross: I bounce mostly between sci-fi and fantasy, with crime coming in third. I keep trying to dabble in horror too, but that’s not going so well just yet.Back to top >>>

LHP: What/who inspired you to be a writer?

A.D. Ross: I’ve always had an over-active imagination and a tendency to attach narratives to anything, so it wasn’t so much being inspired, as it was giving in to the inevitable. Back to top >>>

LHP: Describe your writing process. What comes first–character or plot? Do you “pants” it or outline?

A.D. Ross: I try to plan the overall outline in advance of writing. So many times I’ve had an idea, jumped into the story, thinking it would grow as I started bashing it out, only to hit a dead-end. That said, I do sometimes find myself coming to unexpected twists in the narrative, when the story seems to be writing itself, and generally that’s when I find I’m enjoying writing the most.Back to top >>>

LHP: What is your daily/weekly routine as a writer?

A.D. Ross: I don’t really have a writing routine as such; I tend to let story ideas percolate and then write in spurts. If the story isn’t quite there in my head, I end up going back to the drawing board.Back to top >>>

LHP: Are there any software tools, resources, or websites you use often while writing?

A.D. Ross: Aside from Word, I usually keep an online dictionary and thesaurus bookmarked. Beyond that, it’s a Google search, if I need to look something up.Back to top >>>

LHP: What are some of your biggest challenges you feel like you have to overcome in your writing career?

A.D. Ross: A big challenge for me, when it comes to writing short stories, is stopping them from over-spilling their margins. I have several secondary worlds that I write in and I like to weave bits of backstory in and out; but that’s a balancing act. I’ve abandoned quite a few stories because they got too preoccupied with “franchise building” and simply didn’t work as standalone pieces of short fiction.Back to top >>>

LHP: Do you have a set number of words per day you target? or do you set other goals to meet?

A.D. Ross: Unless I’m trying to hit a specific deadline for something, the only standing goal I have is to keep moving forward; whether that be re-editing existing work, plotting out new stories, identifying potential opportunities or actually putting words onto paper.

How much time is spent on “the business of writing” – queries, seeking an agent or publisher, marketing/sales?A.D. Ross: At present I’m only shopping around short stories and I’ve got enough of them in a finished state that I can blitz half-a-dozen submissions at a time. That means it really fluctuates. For weeks most of my writing time can be taken up with researching possible markets, reformatting stories and submitting. Then, at other times, I might go several weeks without addressing the business aspect of things.Back to top >>>

LHP: Do you prefer short stories or full length novels in your writing?

A.D. Ross: Right now short stories are my primary medium, in large part because I find them a good exercise in discipline. When I was younger, I was always starting Lord-of-the-Rings-sized projects that I was never, ever going to finish. That said, my first full-length novel, which is “finished” in that it does presently have a beginning, middle and end, started as a pair of short stories that went rogue, bonded and grew into a 140,000 word monster in the space of four months.Back to top >>>

LHP: Can you give some us some insight into your story?

A.D. Ross: It was born out of an idle daydream about a sort of “Wicker Man” scenario playing out in a very faceless and impersonal block of modern flats, where someone might stumble into it unknowingly. From there came the notion of what if that someone wasn’t a run-of-the-mill victim or unsuspecting hero, but rather a monster from a different kind of story. I tried to approach the story as if Anton Chigurh had found himself on Summerisle.Back to top >>>

LHP: What advice can you give other writers?

A.D. Ross: I’m really just getting started myself, so I’m not sure I’m in much of a position to offer advice, but if I were really pressed, I’d probably just say: keep asking questions of yourself and your work, keep reading as widely as possible, seek out criticism and consider it as objectively as you can, don’t fear rejection, and most of all just keep going. This is basically what I keep reiterating to myself.Back to top >>>